To me the big flaw is that FDA approval and the associated studies were enough to drive the prescriptions. It would be pretty easy for the healthcare system to systematically run their own comparative studies on new drugs (during the course of normal care). There's some ethical mumbo jumbo around best possible care to look at, but I think being cautious about unfamiliar products is probably a nice offset to those concerns.
Where I quoted Peter Pronovost (the checklist guy) saying:
The fundamental problem with the quality of American medicine is that we’ve failed to view delivery of health care as a science. The tasks of medical science fall into three buckets. One is understanding disease biology. One is finding effective therapies. And one is ensuring those therapies are delivered effectively. That third bucket has been almost totally ignored by research funders, government, and academia. It’s viewed as the art of medicine.
This is literally a case of boxes 1 and 2 being checked, with little attention to box 3.
I find myself thinking back to this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11627213
Where I quoted Peter Pronovost (the checklist guy) saying:
The fundamental problem with the quality of American medicine is that we’ve failed to view delivery of health care as a science. The tasks of medical science fall into three buckets. One is understanding disease biology. One is finding effective therapies. And one is ensuring those therapies are delivered effectively. That third bucket has been almost totally ignored by research funders, government, and academia. It’s viewed as the art of medicine.
This is literally a case of boxes 1 and 2 being checked, with little attention to box 3.